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The Recruiting Front Lines has evolved. At the beginning of the year, I changed jobs within my company, moving away from Outreach and Education, and into my new role as Director of Business Development. While I remain closely involved with our field activity, I am now more focused on strategic partnerships, social media, and the world of internet recruitment resources. As I have made this change, the focus of my blog content has also changed. Recently, I began to feel that many of the ideas I had for blog posts would not fit within the framework of The Recruiting Front Lines. This was a cause of some frustration, as I felt that I was either misrepresenting my content with the title of my blog, or that I was stifling my writing because I felt it didn't fit.
To rectify this situation, I have created a new blog home, now on WordPress. I am still ironing out the wrinkles, but feel that it is far enough along that I can move all my past content, and begin posting all new content, at the new address. I would like to formally welcome everyone to come check out my new home at jasonblais.com. I can't wait to hear what you think!
Best Regards, and Thank you for your time and attention over the past 18 months.
Jason

Jan 31, 2008

From the front lines: RI Municipalities and University of Maine graduates

Thanks for taking a look at the first post from the front lines of the recruiting market. This week, I visited the University of Maine, Orono campus to exhibit and promote our state-specific employment resource to juniors and seniors seeking higher education in this school, probably best known for it's engineering program and division I hockey team. I also traveled to Warwick, RI to exhibit and network to support our RI-based job board at the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns 8th Annual Convention. When our field reps attend events, we always have two missions- promote the job board to job seekers to build brand awareness and site traffic; and build relationships with local employers who may have a need to advertise local jobs. [As a quick disclaimer, I'd like to note that the consultants, trainers, and professionals that work in our field operations, including myself, are not sales reps, and are never responsible for closing sales.] Our primary role includes a little of each of the following: Public Relations, Relationship Building, Education and Training, Marketing, and Promotion.

RI LEAGUE OF CITIES AND TOWNS8TH ANNUAL CONVENTIONThe 8th Annual Convention for the RILCT is an event devoted to providing programming updates, and resources to the municipalities in Rhode Island. They also allow companies to pay to exhibit at this event, which was held this year at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick. About 80 companies paid for the privilege of promoting their goods and services to municipal employees who attended workshops throughout the day. The attendees included town planners and engineers, city clerks, tax assessors, strategic planners and other city government titles, while the exhibitors ranged in services from health insurance providers to financing institutions, from traffic congestions solutions to engineering firms, and from storage centers to environmental systems.... oh, and of course there was one company there promoting cost effective recruiting resources :) Sorry, but I just can't pass up a shameless plug.

I attended this event with one of our outreach consultants, and we spoke with dozens of municipal employees from various cities and towns across the state, and spent a great deal of time also talking with other businesses vying for budget dollars of those municipalities. Overall, there was a great deal of interest about the recruiting industry in RI, and people seemed very interested in the price savings available through our service. Now, that may sound like an obvious statement, but truly it's a little surprising, and perhaps indicative of the reaction to recent stories about local economic slow downs, and the national dialogue of the dreaded R word. The reason I say it's surprising is that price hasn't been the hot button issue in recruiting in RI over the past few years. Most organizations, including the public sector, were very happy to pay the rising costs for employment advertising, to stay with what has long been the cornerstone of job posting- print media. While most of the country has made the turn to the internet, and realized the increased flexibility, reach, and cost savings, RI-based employers have held tight to the state's pre-eminent newspaper. Price was not the most important issue; for many it was simply the maintenance of the status quo which drove the recruitment advertising decision-making, particularly in those businesses that have long bureaucratic lineages.

SO, this development of price, value, and return on investment as a key analytical metric in the Ocean State is a new story. Here are some quick bullets on some of the other recurring issues we heard from the front lines of the recruiting market in RI:

Budgets are expected to be very tight this year

Not much job growth is expected, though most understood that turnover would continue to be a reality. This year's question will be how do they stay fully staffed and find good, qualified candidates, while operating with a lower budget for recruiting

A significant number of mature workers are facing the prospect of a transitional work period. Those close to retirement age feel that the budget cuts may include them, so are facing he prospect of finding a new job for a few years to bridge the gap to social security, and even fill in the household budget holes left by insufficient retirement savings.

Employers are very concerned about the Brain Drain. Keeping the young professionals in the state is a concern of every region of the country, but in RI, with the borders so close, and the chatter of the economic outlook being bleak, people are very conscious of this issue.

Engineering continues to be a very competitive field, and while recent college grads can be found, many firms are continuing to have difficulty finding those 3-5 year experience candidates.

UNIVERSITY OF MAINE CAREER FAIRThe University of Maine is the largest post-secondary school in the state, and offers a wide variety of programs, with their engineering school being one of the most respected. On January 30th, they hosted more than 160 employers to the career event to meet their students. Indeed, there were engineering firms from as far away as Texas exhibiting to attract these fresh faced soon to be graduates to their companies. Our business is currently recruiting for Software developers, Database administrators, and sales, so we were collecting resumes and meeting students as well. I have attended career fairs at nearly all the colleges and universities in ME, NH, VT, and RI, over the past 4 years, private and public, so it's always fun to compare the preparedness and quality of students at these events to the rest.

I have to say, in all honesty, that the overwhelming majority of students that we saw and spoke with were well dressed, prepared to ask and answer questions, armed with updated resumes, and actively looking to impress. For those of you reading this blog, I'm sure you'll find it to be no surprise that despite graduating in just a few months, many many students still are not sure what they want to do. The engineering program at UMaine is strong, and the students graduating from that program were very focused on their potential jobs, while many other majors, such as New Media Studies, English, Business Administration, to name a few, were only vaguely aware of what real-world opportunities would satisfy their dreams and desires.

(I always have to laugh when I meet with students, and ask them what kind of work they are looking for, and they look me square in the eyes with their power-business-woman-makeup or their almost-a-beard-facial-hair covering their young and naive faces, and say simply, "management". I normally respond to this question by asking, what type of management are they interested in, to which I usually get a blank look followed by "well, any kind of management really." Please know that I say this with the greatest humility and humor, as almost all of us were in their shoes at some time)

In speaking with some of the other exhibitors close to us, we heard a great deal of optimism at the front lines of the recruiting market. Local businesses felt that these graduates were very strong candidates, and that the business climate in ME would be mildly insulated from any potential R word, as we have such a unique economic profile and entrepreneurial spirit. Most organizations had a great deal of respect for the education that UMaine provided, and felt that while students will always lack real-world skills, the career services and department heads have done a great job of readying the student body for the labor market.

Students, on the other hand, always seem filled with an almost manic bipolarism of unbridled confidence and optimism, combined with an underlying concern of the lack of time that they have to find the right job, and the fear of making the wrong career decision. We spent a great deal talking with students in the business administration program who were interested in our business, a Maine based business which has had tremendous growth over 8 years. Many of the students were keenly interested in becoming a manager, but were not sure about the process to get from college grad to mid-level manager to senior manager. I really enjoy providing resume tips, career exploration advice, and ideas for resources that can help students find out what kind of work will really make them happy.

IF anyone knows of good resources to help kids assess their options, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!

4 comments:

What an Excellent Event to attend. With over 160 Exhibitors the U Maine students had a real sense of what its like to look for work out in the real world. I due have to say that the JobsInME Booth was by far one of the most busiest exhibitors at the fair. JobsInME provided product demonstrations for the students on how to post there resume online, using the JobsInME software. Not only were they providing demonstrations they were also looking to hire qualified candidates for positions in there home office in Westbrook, ME. What a great company, they provide a free internet site for jobs seekers to find ways on how to write better resumes, ask better interview questions and find the job that is right for them. As the largest Job Board in the state JobsInME.com is the industry leader when it comes to looking for a job via the internet.

As an attendee to the ’08 RI League of Cities & Towns Convention, I must say that it is always a unique event. I have always said that politically, Rhode Island operates more like a medium-sized city than a state anyway. The phrase that “everybody knows everybody” rings more true here than anywhere else in the country, or perhaps the world.

Networking, therefore, is essential in any type of business activity in RI – and nowhere is this more evident than in recruiting. A person’s worth in RI is measured based on the town they group in, the high school they went to, the organizations they are members of, and the politicians who know their first name.

Standing in line at a convenience store behind a gubernatorial candidate, the secretary of state, a top TV news anchor or even the governor’s wife is a common place, daily occurrence.

Did I mention that Rhode Island is a very small place?

So through the years, jobs in many of these communities would often go to who they knew – friends, relatives, friends of friends, and the like. After all, who else was there!

But as the Internet has brought the world closer together, and the budget crunch and recession have hindered the ability of cites and towns to conduct business efficiently, they are slowly turning to technology, and websites like www.JobsinRI.com, as a recruiting solution – the ultimate way to inexpensively reach genuine, Rhode Island candidates!. Newspapers like the Providence Journal – who dominated the advertising market for so, so long – have slowly lost their edge because of their skyrocketing fees and their inability to communicate at the local level. (In fact, the ProJo has gone entirely the other direction, abandoning their local roots with a national Yahoo recruiting partnership – YIKES!)

So www.JobsinRI.com exhibited at this year’s Convention, like an old friend, neighbor or high school classmate, shaking hands, distributing information, and standing poised ready to assist.

I'm excited to discover this site. I want to to thank you for your time just for this wonderful read!! I definitely really liked every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new information on your blog. zobacz, http://ewedontknowrach.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/here-goes-nothing/

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Mission of the Recruiting Front Lines Blog

Hi everyone. Through this blog I will be recording the pulse of the recruiting market as I see it. When I refer to the front lines of the recruiting market, I am alluding to both sides of the market- job seekers and employers- and the goings on in employment and recruiting trends at the street level across new england and the gulf coast. (New England and the Gulf Coast? That's right. Those are two regions that I cover as the Field Operations Manager for JobsInTheUS.com, so while they may be a drastically different in geography, culture, personality, and industry profile, I am acutely focused on the front lines of the recruiting markets in these two regions)

As the Field Operations Manager for JobsInTheUS, I have a unique opportunity to spend my working life talking with employers, mostly recruiters, and job seekers from all walks of life, in all industries, from all sizes of companies, with the discussion focused on finding work and finding qualified employees. While our company does an excellent job of providing quantitative analysis of the labor market through the JobsInTheUS Employment Indexes, published monthly, I felt a lack of any qualitative information about the look and feel of the recruiting market- the pulse of the employment sector if you will. This is why I decided to start this blog- to provide a street level perspective of the issues, concerns, assumptions, and hopes from both sides of the recruiting coin. I hope this information provides interested parties with a better view of the market, based on real conversations with the people who deal with these issues every day.

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RFL's LOCAL JOB SEARCH TOOL

Through HR and Recruiting networks that I'm in, I recently found a grass roots initiative where HR/Recruiting social networkers are pledging tohelp one person find a jobstarted on Twitter. It's one way to feel like we're doing a small part to help those who have been part of the mass layoffs nationwide. READ AND SHARE JOBANGEL SUCCESS STORIES HERETo help do facilitate this initiative, I've added this new search tool. You can use customized search below to find real, local jobs in ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, LA, AL, and MS.